Love Like Gentlemen

Afghan Whigs have completed their new album, “Black Love” , which is scheduled for release by Mute in March. The album – described by the Maker’s David Bennun as being very much in the same vein as the “Gentlemen” LP, – will be proceeded by a single, which is still to be chosen.
The tracks on Black Love are: “Crime Scene Part One”, “My Enemy”, “Double Day”, “Blame, Etc”, “Step Into The Light”, “Going To Town”, “Honly’s Ladder” (my set list has this titled as Honky’s Ladder), “Night By Candlelight”, “Bulletproof”, “Summer’s Kiss”, and “Faded”. Bennun, who has heard an advance tape, has this to say: “The only surprising thing about it is how good it is. When a band makes an album as good as ‘Gentlemen’ , you have to expect the follow-up will be a let down. “‘Black Love’ has more pace than ‘Gentlemen’. It doesn’t sound as ferocious, and it’s not as quickly addictive, but it’s highly dramatic. As you’d expect from the title, it deals mostly with Greg Dulli’s established field of expertise, the male psyche in relation to women. It’s very, very sinister, full of loathing and lust. It’s merciless in it’s analysis. In Dulli’s songs, men are self-serving scum and women aren’t much better. “There are a few tracks that immediately grab your attention the way that ‘Debonair’ off the last album did: ‘My Enemy’; ‘Honky’s Ladder’, which begins with the line, ‘Got you where I want you, motherfucker’, and then gets nasty; ‘Blame, Etc’ , which is about the kind of supreme arrogance you get when you start to believe you’re immortal. “Many of the other songs are slow-building, working their way up to a typical Whigs frenzy. The album’s not as loud through and through as some of the previous Whigs stuff, but it’s just as intense. It still has that touch of soul, that Marvin Gaye feeling around the screeching guitars.”